


He's Just Not Himself

by TheseusInTheMaze



Category: That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome
Genre: Dark, Dark Month, Gen, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-28 08:28:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/989893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheseusInTheMaze/pseuds/TheseusInTheMaze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Chick can tell that the Critic came back from the Plot Hole... changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He's Just Not Himself

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dark Month - "It's not him, I know it. Last night he sliced his hand open cooking and he bled black."

Everyone knows the story.

Well, okay, not everyone-everyone, but everyone involved in the whole thing knows what happened, more or less. 

The Critic became one with the plot hole, saved the day, then Stuff happened (unspecified Stuff), and he came back. All well and good, all well and good, but the Chick didn't buy it. There was something different about him, something she couldn't put her finger on, except that it made her bones itch and her teeth buzz.

Some of it was grief, and she knew that, even if she ignored that fact, because she refused to believe that she was grieving for anything or anyone, let alone that asshole manchild. And some of it was probably a reaction to the sheer WRONGNESS of it, and the weirdness of the whole situation. For all that she dealt with weird shit pretty often; there is a given amount of weird a person can take before they experience some equivalent of a burnout. 

But there was something else, something she couldn't explain, except that there was a wrongness that made her skin want to crawl right off of her body and under the nearest piece of heavy furniture. There was something off about his eyes. He moved strangely. His skin was different. There were half a billion things wrong with him, and nobody believed her. 

Not Paw, or Film Brain, or Nella, or anyone, and that was almost as maddening. It made her want to pull her hair out in chunks, and it made her want to punch things, but there was nothing she could do, other than avoid the Critic as much as she could.

It wasn't as easy as it should have been, because the two of them still lived together, and even in a giant hotel the size of a city block, there was still the occasional bump-into-each-other-in-the-hallway moment.

Or the kitchen, in this case. 

It was late evening, and the Chick had been hoping that the Critic wasn't around. Maybe off doing whatever shit he did on his own these days, although fuck knew what that might be. 

He was standing at the counter, slicing up tomatoes. He looked up at her and smiled, but there was something... odd about his smile. Of course there was. She wasn't going to think about it, because she'd already done too much thinking about it, and all she wanted to do was to get a beer or three and escape to her room. But the Critic seemed to be in a chatty mood, or... something. Maybe he just felt like annoying her. 

"What's been your problem with me lately?" The kitchen was quiet, apart from the ticking of the clock, the quiet squish of the tomatoes, and the thud of the knife on the cutting board. 

"You're imagining things," the Chick said, keeping her back to him.

"So, uh...." There was an awkward pause. "Are we ever gonna do that Rocky Horror Picture Show review?" 

"No," said the Chick, reaching further into the fridge, more to keep her back to the Critic than to specifically find anything. 

"Aw, you were really into that idea, why the change?" There was another squish, and then some general clattering about. Then the faucet turned on. That in and of itself was weird - the Critic used to only do dishes under EXTREME duress. Diamanda Hagan had once had to hold him up at gunpoint to get it done. 

There was a thick sound, and then a lot of swearing. The Chick jerked around, more out of instinct than anything else (certain things are hard wired into most human beings, and "swearing" plus “knife" is a combo that almost always elicits a reaction). 

The Critic was holding his hand under the faucet, and the swearing was at a level of creativity heretofore unknown to the Chick. Once again, acting (mostly) on instinct, she rushed over to the sink. 

And then she stopped. 

The Critic had his hand under the faucet, and there was a sizable gash across his palm. There was... stuff coming out of it. Oily and black and thick, like the ink of ancient ball point pens. It smelled foul. 

The Chick said something. She didn't remember. She more or less RAN back to her room, and she stayed there, wrapped in blankets and trembling. Logically, her freak out made no sense. She knew this. She spent the rest of the night wrapped in a blanket, her brain trying to figure out what it saw while, simultaneously, trying to gibber like a character out of Lovecraft. She didn't know WHY it felt so wrong, except that it did, and she was chilled to the marrow, and that was annoying her.

The annoyance eventually beat back the terror, around seven in the morning, or maybe it was exhaustion. She felt lightheaded, almost giddy, as she padded downstairs, the linoleum cold on the soles of her feet. The sun shone through the windows of the hallway, then the stairwell, stabbing the darkness like so many silvery knives, illuminating each landing of the stairwell. She made her way downstairs, her eyes adjusting as she reached the basement, then the sub-basement, then the sub-sub-basement. 

When she opened the door to Insano's lab, the florescent light hit her in the face like a shiny metal brick wrapped in a bright white sock, reflecting on half a billion surfaces. She almost staggered, blinking the spots out of her vision.

Insano was sitting at a lab table, doing something with beakers and mumbling to himself. He looked disheveled, but he rarely looked otherwise. The Chick didn’t' think she had much room to judge - she was still in her ratty pajama bottoms printed with little robots, and an old hoodie of Todd's that she had "liberated" from the laundry room. 

"What is it?" Insano looked over at her, and the Chick looked back, avoiding the spirals of his goggles. Bad things could happen if you got too caught up in them. 

"I don't think the Critic came back right," the Chick said, sticking her hands into the pockets of the hoodie.

"We've been over this before," snapped Insano, sounding bored and manic at the same time, which seemed to be a tone that only he could use. 

"No, listen. It's not him. I know it. Last night, he sliced his hand open cooking and he bled black." She took a deep breath, feeling something between foolish and relieved. "I mean, okay, I know how ridiculous this sounds, but -"

"I don't want to hear it," said Insano. "I've done all the tests, and it's CLEAR that he's human."

The Chick swallowed thickly, feeling something in her throat move down, making her fists ball up and her jaw clench. "But you don't understand!" She hated how thick her voice was. She didn’t know if it was tears or rage that was making her chest tight, but she didn't care. She bit her lip and glared at Insano. "I guess it's my own fault for coming to a quack like you in the first place," she said, in a tone that was in the same neighborhood as casual, and she turned around, making as if to walk away.

"Quack?! Who are you calling a quack?! I'll have you know I graduated with honors from mad scientist school, and at the top of my class!" She could practically hear him foaming at the mouth. 

"Well, if you're not a quack, prove me wrong, or admit that I'm right." She turned around, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning against the lab table. 

"Fine. You want to be proven wrong by the great Insano?" He rummaged around in his lab coat pocket, then pulled out an orange prescription bottle. "Take two of these." 

"What will they do to me?" The Chick eyed the bottle somewhat nervously, because taking pills handed to you by a mad scientist usually isn't the best idea.

"They'll make you see what's REALLY there, the way it really is." He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe it was, to him. 

The Chick opened the bottle and shook two pills out and into her palm, looking down at them. They were big, for pills, but not gigantic. They were light blue in color. Cautiously, she put them in her mouth and swallowed them dry, grimacing at the bitter taste. 

Nothing happened.

Nothing continued to happen for a few minutes as the Chick stood anxiously in place, half expecting the world to explode or her stomach to violently reject the pills. She was just about to tell Insano off for giving her a placebo, when everything... twitched. It wasn't like the world got fuzzier, exactly, but everything looked off. Hazy, almost. Things seemed to be flickering, like someone using a camera flash over and over again. She glanced over at Insano, and he was flickering strangely, like an image superimposed on film. He was flickering between his lab coated, begoggled self, and some random dude who looked just like him - not Spoony, but some other guy - a boring looking guy. 

She blinked and backed away, ignoring Insano's shouted warnings, because his voice was somewhat... off as well, in a way she couldn't explain. Almost as if there were two people speaking at once, saying different things, completely out of sync. 

On the way up the stairs (blinking in the murky light), she bumped into Diamanda Hagan, and that was even MORE unsettling - she stared up at Diamanda's face as it... changed, from makeup to bare skin, from glasses to no glasses. The change in expression was the most striking - from scowl to concern, with no in-between. It was a bit like an incomplete flip book. 

The two women - were they two women, or one woman, or both? - spoke at the same time, and said completely different things, in completely different voices. 

Diamanda barked for the Chick to watch where the fuck she was going.

The other woman asked if the Chick was alright.

The Chick backed away, making her way up the steps, and even THEY seemed to flicker in and out of existence, although they felt solid enough under her bare feet. By the time she hit the kitchen, everything was flickering, and it was giving her a headache that felt a bit like panic bursting up and out of her throat. She bit it back by sheer force of will.

There were a bunch of people gathered around the kitchen table, and most of them were flickering, with a few exceptions. Film Brain didn't seem to be - neither did Rap Critic. And nobody else seemed to notice it - although, then again, she had to remind herself, she was on Insano’s special mind control pill... thing. Whatever it was. 

"Could you move outta the way?" The Critic's voice was directly behind her, and it had at least three different voices, all three of them saying different things in different ways. 

The Chick took a deep breath and turned around, and then she bit her tongue, because the hysterics were bubbling up inside of her like soap in a drain. 

The Critic... the flickering was that much worse, and it was... different, and wrong, and she didn't know why or how, but it left her trembling and terrified, and that made her mad, which just made it worse. 

"What? Do I have something on my face?" The Critic shouldered past her, and the Chick left the kitchen, because she was scared of the idea nibbling along the edges of her mind like a maggot. 

The mirror on her dresser was directly opposite her door, and her reflection was the first thing she saw when she stepped into the room.

She stared into her own eyes, and they were flickering, like someone setting off a flashbulb over and over.

The Chick wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes, and she wondered what color her blood would be, if she checked, right now.


End file.
